NFL players need Obama's support

When the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl in 1997, they made the National Football League champion’s traditional visit to the White House to exchange pleasantries with the president. But this year’s Super Bowl winners from Green Bay don’t have similar plans.

How appropriate.

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After all, President Barack Obama refused early last month to support — or even get involved in — the players’ labor fight against NFL owners. He dismissed the players as millionaires fighting billionaires, saying he was more concerned about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on state-employee unions.

“My working assumption, at a time when people are having to cut back, compromise and worry about making the mortgage and paying for their kids’ college educations,” Obama said at a news conference, “is that the two parties should be able to work it out without the president of the United States intervening.”

Obama may have made a politically astute move by not picking a side in pro football’s offseason showdown. But it smacked of disingenuousness after he criticized as “an assault on unions” Walker’s proposal to strip public-sector employees of collective-bargaining rights. The NFL owners’ fight against the league’s proletariat, regardless of the players’ wealth or the public’s perception of it, differs very little from the Wisconsin battle.

The NFL fight is a serious attack on unions. In mid-March, team owners locked out the players, who decertified their union to challenge the league’s antitrust protection. The players then filed a court complaint to recoup more than $4 billion in TV revenue they claimed the league “left on the table” during recent contract negotiations.

The president may be as misguided as were 1987 fans, who had also remained cool toward striking NFL players.

Indeed, more than 25 years later, retired Packers tackle Ken Ruettgers still remembers that the players had little public support when he and his NFL brethren went on strike against league owners and management.

“The biggest issue was free agency, which is a constitutionally protected right to work for who you want to work for,” Ruettgers told me last month. “There was no sympathy for players, because they were millionaires.”

“If you make money, it’s OK to have less rights. It’s just part of [the public’s] perspective,” said Ruettgers, who was in his third season with Green Bay when NFL players went on strike. “But last I checked, Lady Justice wore a blindfold to gender, race and class.”

As such, NFL players, like state workers in Wisconsin, deserve equitable remuneration for their labor, safeguards for their future and safer working conditions. Whether workers are pro football players, school teachers or firefighters, collective bargaining provides labor a means to negotiate with management for all concerns — hallmarks of the American working class. None of those concerns were givens; they were won by collective bargaining.